The Chairman's Verdict

"Wow! The photos turned out great."

"Ooh, so pretty. But PD Seo, your face looks like it's about to explode. What's wrong with you? Like it's your first kiss ever~"

At Seul-i's playful teasing, Jaein couldn't quite bring herself to laugh along.

Because it really was the first.

Ever since the wedding.

Just the brush of his lips against her cheek yesterday had sent her heart pounding so hard she thought she was losing her mind.

Just as Jaein's mind had gone completely blank—

"If you're that curious, check later."

"……?"

Taeha rose from his seat and looked down at her with an infuriating smirk.

"Just watch the broadcast, won't you?"

At his parting words, a hollow laugh burst out of her despite herself.

"No need for more takes. We'll go with this photo. Now we'll shoot the video."

Even as the staff bustled about preparing for the video shoot, Jaein could only stare at Taeha.

Something's wrong.

Woo Taeha was wrong in a way that went far beyond wrong.

He's changed too much. A single accident turned him into a completely different person?

Don't tell me his memory of his fiancée got swapped with mine?

What had begun as a dismissed possibility was starting to feel like genuine suspicion.

Jaein fiddled with the phone sitting on the desk. She was still debating whether to call his primary physician when she noticed Taeha already wearing a microphone and walking toward her.

"Oh, right. Grandfather comes home soon."

"What? Really?"

The sudden news of Chairman Woo Byungho's return sent Jaein into a spiral of thought, forgetting entirely that they were in the middle of a studio.

……That explains it.

Of course the news of the variety show couldn't have failed to reach America when the filming crew had descended on Cheongdam-dong like that.

Truthfully, Jaein had assumed Junhee would summon her separately to discuss the matter.

Weren't there plenty of familiar scripts for this sort of thing?

Do you have any idea what kind of family you married into, and you're doing a variety show?

She'd expected Junhee to slam down an ultimatum demanding the whole thing be erased as if it had never happened. Yet since that day, Junhee had said nothing.

No—that was just it. Not a word, not a single gesture, which had struck Jaein as strange.

Because she knows Grandfather is coming back, doesn't she?

Junhee seemed to believe that once Byungho returned, he would clean up this whole mess himself.

Byungho hated anything that tarnished the Group's name with a passion that bordered on foaming at the mouth.

And if it was owner risk? All the more so.

Grandfather would obviously hate it.

He would do everything in his power to quash Sesame Couple.

For Junhee, it would be like wiping her nose without lifting a finger.

Taeha might earn himself a permanent black mark in Byungho's book over this, but even then, he'd already ascended to the Vice Chairmanship. The very fact that Taeha had taken that title over his own father Seokmin showed just how dearly Byungho cherished him.

A brief stir of noise would fade with time as Taeha found a new marriage prospect. No one in the family outshone him.

So that's why there'd been no contact all this time.

Byungho rarely returned to Korea as it was, so Jaein hadn't factored him in at all when it came to the variety show appearance.

Is the filming going to get shut down at this rate?

They'd already finished the profile shoot, too.

It would certainly be the faster route to divorce, but since this was the program Jaein had weathered years of ups and downs with, she couldn't bring herself to feel purely glad about it.

She'd only met Byungho once, in person.

But that one meeting—Byungho had made a request of her, and it weighed on her mind.

Now that the variety show exit and divorce she'd wanted were so abruptly within reach, she felt oddly adrift, as if the ground had shifted beneath her.

"When does Grandfather arrive?"

"Today."

"What? Today, as in right now?"

Jaein raised her voice, forgetting entirely that the filming team was around her.

"Why? Is that a problem?"

Looking at Taeha's utterly calm expression, Jaein was dumbfounded. The Chairman was coming home today—how could that not be a problem?

"When did you find out, sunbae?"

"Yesterday. Mother called to tell me. Said he'd arrive tomorrow evening."

Jaein was so hollowed out that not even a laugh would come, while Taeha remained simply detached.

As if none of it touched him at all.

"You can stay home. I'll go alone."

Taeha mentioned it offhandedly to Jaein before the dinner gathering.

There was no need for her to come along.

And yet she was the one who insisted on going.

For one reason only: judgment was about to be handed down on the entire Daeha household.

I can't exactly sit this out while everything gets settled, can I?

Besides, she had that request from Byungho, and she felt it was only right to report on it in person.

He was the only one in that family who had ever treated her like a human being when everyone else cast her out.

On the rare day with no filming, at a seat she'd struggled to claim, Jaein walked straight into a situation she never saw coming.

"……Taeha. You're telling me you're filming a variety show with Jaein?"

Byungho's question broke the silence that had settled over the dinner table, and every gaze in the room swiveled toward Taeha.

The eyes of everyone present—Junhee, Seokmin, even the aunts—glinted with something unmistakable.

They were all of one mind, one purpose.

The moment has come!

Chairman Woo would surely cut the filming short with a single stroke of the blade.

Just as they were closing their eyes one by one in anticipation of the thunderclap—

"Let him! To his heart's content."

At Byungho's blandly added words, every pair of eyes in the room stretched wide enough to tear.

"Excuse me? What did you—"

"I said film all you want! Whatever it is, it's all fine by me."

Byungho's pronouncement landed like a bolt from the blue, and the entire table shot to their feet.

"F-Father!"

"Father-in-law!"

"Dad!"

Jaein, too, stared at Taeha in shock.

The only person calmly draining his water glass amid it all was Taeha himself.

"Th-that doesn't make any sense! You can't allow it!"

"When has anything I, Woo Byungho, say yes to ever been a no?"

"……B-but the Group's PR department will never stand for it!"

"This father says yes. Who in Daeha is going to tell him no?"

The moment Byungho delivered his permission in no uncertain terms, Miyeon's mouth hung open, unable to close.

Byungho swept his gaze around the dining room, then turned toward Taeha.

"Do as you like. Might as well shed that stuffy chaebol image while you're at it. It suits you."

"D-Dad! But—"

"No buts about it. What on earth is there to object to? Companies these days need to know how to reach out to the people, get close to them. How long do you plan on living so sealed off?"

With a sharp click of his tongue, Byungho smacked his spoon down against the table and went on.

"And one more thing. I heard about the kimjang. All these years, Jaein's been handling the kimchi on her own—hers and yours, I'm told."

"……"

"Pathetic! How many people live in this house, and you made the new daughter-in-law do it all by herself?"

Byungho turned toward Miyeon and Jeonghwa, and both of them flinched.

"……Pardon? Who would've—who on earth told you that, Father?"

Red-faced, Miyeon darted her eyes around the room.

"Dad! We didn't make her do it—she was making so much anyway, we just split a little of it among ourselves."

"That's right. Dad, there are four of us in each of our households—how much could we possibly have taken? Unnie's hands are so generous, we only received a little here and there. Right?"

At the excuses piling up from Jeonghwa and Miyeon, Byungho snorted through his nose.

"A little, huh—sixty heads each? From what I hear, the girl was making enough on her own to rival several ordinary households combined!"

Ordinary households, was it?

Jaein had made enough to rival a small-and-medium-enterprise-scale kimchi factory.

"And that's work for our granddaughter-in-law now? From here on out, everyone makes their own kimchi!"

"D-Dad!"

"Dad, it's all a misunderstanding."

Jaein watched Byungho's thundering outburst with astonishment.

But how did he even know about that?

She had, of course, made the kimchi with her own hands every year, but unless it was Kim-ssi, who had helped with the work, no one else could have known.

It was simply baffling.

"Seriously, who on earth fed Dad all this useless gossip?"

"The useless gossip came from me, aunts."

And then it happened.

Taeha, who had kept quietly silent until that moment, set his spoon down with a clack loud enough to ring.

In an instant, every gaze in the room converged on him.

"He said he'd arrive this morning, so I called and told him."

"What? No, Grandfather's been run off his feet with his trip back—and why on earth would you go telling him that?"

"Because he should know. Otherwise, you aunts would've been calling on Jaein at your whim again, wouldn't you?"

As he said it, Taeha looked each of them in the eye in turn—Miyeon, Jeonghwa, and Ara.

With a gaze like a warning.

"Don't give Jaein any of your dirty work ever again. Understood?"

Faced with a side of Taeha's eyes she had never seen before—cold and razor-sharp—Jaein swallowed dryly.